Massive Waggoner Ranch, "last of the True West," is up for grabs

The main entrance to the Zaca-weista - an Indian name that means "good grass" - compound. The ranch is three-fourths the size of Rhode Island.﻿

Photo: Chris Collis

VERNON - In the spring of 1868, Tommy Waggoner, age 16, had a job to do. His father, a widower, needed him to drive 5,000 ill-tempered steers from the family ranch in Northwest Texas to Kansas City. To equip his son for the arduous, invariably dangerous trek, Dan Waggoner provided a team of drovers, 50 saddle-sore horses and $12.

Task completed, young Waggoner came home with $55,000 in his saddle bag, seed money for one of the state's great ranching empires. A full-fledged partner with his dad at 17, the young rancher would amass in the coming decades more than 510,000 acres, making the W.T. Waggoner Ranch the largest spread behind one fence in the United States.

These days, Waggoner Ranch manager Weldon Hawley has a herd of cows up north, as well. Because of the lingering drought punishing Texas, they're grazing on grassland on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota - great ranching country with plenty of water, Hawley says.

With "extreme" bleeding into "exceptional" on the Texas Water Development Board's latest color-coded drought report, the state's cattle-ranching future is hazy, even if the sky isn't - about as hazy, in fact, as the fate of the Waggoner Ranch. For the first time in its storied history, the giant spread is on the market and could be broken up - into smaller ranches, suburban ranchettes, subdivisions, who knows what.

$725 million pricetag

The asking price is $725 million. In addition to 510,527 acres spread over six counties, the buyer will get 42 percent of the mineral rights, all the livestock and rolling inventory, two magnificent ranch homes and the architecturally notable W.T. Waggoner Estate office building in downtown Vernon. It's offered "as a turn-key sale on an as-is, where-is basis," the marketing brochure explains.

It's not the drought that compels the current owners to sell the ranch. It's a years-long family dispute among the heirs of Tom Waggoner. One side has wanted to sell the ranch and divide the assets; the other has insisted on leaving the ranch intact but dividing it up equally. They've been at loggerheads for years.

Nothing unusual about that, said Kerry Cornelius, who directs the ranch management program at Texas Christian University. "Families not being able to get along is the No. 1 reason for land fragmentation," he told me last week, citing a Texas A&M study to that effect.

'It's the romance of it'

A few days ago I went on a quick tour of the ranch with longtime Lubbock broker Sam Middleton, who's handling the sale with Dallas-based broker Bernie Uechtritz of Briggs Freeman Sotheby's International Realty. Riding along on gravel roads under a big, blue sky, I had trouble grasping the size of the place. Spanning nearly 800 square miles, approximately 30 miles east to west and about that distance north to south, the ranch is three-quarters the size of Rhode Island.

"You wouldn't be buying it for the beauty," Middleton said as we looked out over miles of mostly flat terrain and red dirt studded with prickly pear and the ubiquitous mesquite. "It's the romance of it, that and the long-term appreciation."

It's still a cattle operation, with anywhere from 14,000 cows, calves and bulls in years past to about 7,500 now, but horses also are a big business, with almost 500 head in its current inventory. Income streams also include farming (30,000 acres under cultivation), about 1,100 producing oil wells and several recreational lakes, including one that provides water for the city of Wichita Falls.

The ranch employs about 120 people, including cowboys who live with their families in tidy native-stone houses in line camps on the ranch. Some are second-, third-, even fourth-generation hands. According to Hawley, a few of the cowboys have been with the ranch more than 50 years.

The ranch had its beginnings in the mid-1840s when Tennessee native Dan Waggoner and a 15-year-old black slave brought 242 Longhorn cattle and six horses to Wise County, near Decatur. In the 1880s, the elder Waggoner and his son began acquiring land farther north, thousands of acres just below the Red River.

W.T. "Tom" Waggoner continued to expand the operation after his father died in 1902. In 1931, he built Arlington Downs Racetrack in Arlington - now the site of Six Flags Over Texas - and continued to make a name for himself as a breeder of champion quarter horses. The ranch's most famous was Poco Bueno, foaled in 1944 and the first quarter horse ever to be insured for $100,000. The bloodline of the magnificent coal-black animal is still prevalent in the quarter-horse world today.

Middleton took me by Poco Bueno's grave and marker near the main ranch entrance. The horse was buried standing up.

A buyer's concerns

The family dispute simmered for years before bubbling into the open in 1991 when Tom Waggoner's granddaughter, Electra Waggoner Biggs, filed a lawsuit seeking the liquidation of the family estate. Biggs, a noted sculptor and socialite who bequeathed her name to the Buick Electra, died in 2001. When a district judge ruled in favor of liquidation two years later, one of the estate's primary stakeholders, A.B. "Bucky" Wharton III, appealed.

James King of Fort Davis knows a bit about big Texas ranches. A member of the King Ranch family, he sells ranches in the Big Bend area. The Waggoner Ranch sale, he said "is a phenomenon - its heritage, its size, the dollars they're asking."

Still, potential buyers are likely to have some concerns, he added. "The minerals, they're unproven. They're trying to sell the upside. Plus, there's no groundwater. That's a scary thing these days. Also, think about what you could do with $725 million in some place like Wyoming. Why would you want to be in North Texas? But, we have a saying in this business: 'There's a spot for every chair.' "

Dallas broker Uechtritz hopes to find an owner who "will keep the ranch just as it is, protecting, enhancing and preserving it for another 165 years or perhaps forever. "This really is the last of the True West," he said.

Ranching 'good life'

Middleton says he's optimistic they'll find that kind of buyer. "Personally, I hope the buyer is a Texas oilman who'll take it and try to develop more oil production, keep it as a ranch, keep it intact and keep all the employees."

Ranch manager Hawley could live with that. At 63, the soft-spoken Vietnam vet has been a cowboy for most of his adult life. He gets up at 4 every morning, he told me, and has his coffee when the world is quiet and peaceful. About 5, he'll amble down to the cook shack and have breakfast with his ranch hands as they discuss the day's assignments. In the late afternoon he'll spend a couple of hours working his horses. "It's just a good life," he said in his easy-going Texas drawl.

He knows that the good life could be coming to an end, but he hopes not. "What we're hoping and praying for is that the ranch'll stay together," he said last week. A large map of the still-intact spread lay atop his desk.

Next week: The late Electra Waggoner Biggs, the "shining star" of the Waggoner Ranch empire.

Native Texan Joe Holley is a former editorial page editor and columnist for newspapers in San Antonio and San Diego and a staff writer for The Washington Post. He has been a regular contributor to Texas Monthly and Columbia Journalism Review and is the author of two books, including a biography of football hero, Slingin' Sammy Baugh. He joined the Houston Chronicle in 2009.